Category:Accolade

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Accolade (developer)

Accolade was a game developer and publisher founded by two of the founders of Activision. According to legend, many of the Activision employees believed in naming their companies in order to appear first in an alphabetic list of game developers, as Accolade comes before Activision, which comes before Atari (the company most of the founders of Activision came from), and Acclaim (which comes before Accolade) and Absolute Entertainment (which comes before Acclaim) were later founded by other ex-Activision employees. Bob Whitehead left shortly after the company was founded.

Accolade, like many developers in the 1980s, developed games for a number of computer platforms. Test Drive and Hardball! were two of their early titles, and were among their longest-running series. As time went on, they focused on the most popular platforms, eventually including consoles in their release schedule.

In 1991 Accolade was sued by Sega for developing a method for producing unlicensed cartridges for the Sega Genesis. At the time, Sega wanted all of the titles on the system to be exclusive, while Acclaim wanted to produce multi-platform titles. Acclaim had to withdraw all of their Genesis titles from store shelves until reaching a settlement with Sega that allowed them to produce licensed cartridges for multi-platform titles. In 1995, Alan Miller left the company after being replaced as CEO.

1997's Test Drive 4 became one of their best-selling titles. Unfortunately, they had been producing a large number of titles throughout the 1990s that had not sold well and received luke-warm reviews at best. Their last title was Redline in 1999, and that same year the company was bought by Infogrames. Most of the staff and offices were merged with Infogrames, and then renamed Atari when the company acquired the rights to use the name.